The King Of Wishful Thinking by Perri Prinz

To the list of Furry sites that practice censorship we can now add Fur Affinity. I had been reposting some of my essays over there, just to be doing something with my FA journal, but I went in yesterday to find out that the last essay I put up (which was about censorship) had been deleted, and a strike had been registered against my account.

On the one hand, this isn’t bothersome to me, as FA is not my main site for expressing my ideas. It’s a site I use mainly for sharing my artistic output. So, as long as they’re not deleting episodes or art pieces, who cares, right?

But then, if you think about it, for an essay to get deleted, somebody had to report it. And what’s to stop the same people from reporting any random episode as having something controversial in it, whether it does or not? And what mod is going to take the time to read one of my episodes? None. It’s going to be just like on YouTube where stuff gets deleted just because it was reported.

So, my initial reaction was that I’m not going to complain about this. I’m just going to stop using my FA journal for anything. Just like at Flayrah, I’m not going to be speaking freely on any site that regards free speech as some kind of joke. But after a day or so I have to admit, this has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about FA.

I have to confess, I’m starting to feel the same way about Furry Fandom itself. I’ve been like the fandom’s biggest advocate and apologist for at least 15 years, but I don’t feel so good about that anymore.

Previously I was kind of forcing myself to believe there was something inherently good about the fandom; that it was just a few loud nut jobs ruining something great for everybody. So I’ve been trying to portray it as this repressed positive thing. But I can’t honestly say I agree with that anymore.

Ultimately a fandom is what the people who make it up drive it towards. And we are obviously seeing an influx of young people taking over, driving the fandom towards being something aggressively toxic which taints and destroys all goodness. And I find myself increasingly inclined to say I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to have to sit here and make apologies for something that all evidence suggests is becoming morally reprehensible.

In the past, I’ve been perfectly fine with writing Furry essays that dwelt exclusively on the positive, because I saw any negatives as part of a fringe that I wasn’t selling, which could be ignored if one made proper use of filters. But, when I look back on what I wrote now, it seems deceptively biased, because there is no way anyone can avoid getting caught up in the nastiness going on now. The sites won’t let you avoid it. They are like dope pushers demanding that you be injected with their poison as the price for admittance into the community. And any apologetics I might offer to counter that poison are now against the TOS, which says “Conform or be censored and branded a Nazi, with no means allowed to deflect such accusations.”

I used to write stuff like “Furries are the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.” Even at the time I wrote that there were Furries who were not being nice to me. There has never been a time since I entered the community that there weren’t Furries not being nice to me. But I always extended the benefit of the doubt that those people were the exception. It wasn’t something that could be proven, but it at least seemed a likely possibility.

That isn’t the case now. The case now is that nastiness in the community is rampant, that there’s a violent mob rule mentality becoming ever more prevalent, that all those fine ideals of inclusiveness and freedom of expression have gone out the window, and that you literally have to watch every word you say for fear of triggering one of these nasty people who will report you to somebody and get your ideas suppressed, your work destroyed, and your very physical safety threatened.

And here I am with stuff on my sites that portrays this fandom as being this nice thing that people ought to feel safe to get involved with, and I feel bad about that. I feel that writing which may have been true 5 years ago is now dangerously deceptive.

So, I’m generally disenchanted with Furry Fandom. I’m ready to declare it a failure. It has proven itself incapable of living up to its hype. It far better suits the degenerates, the politicians and bullies than it suits nice people who just want to celebrate the fine art of anthropomorphism. And I don’t think I should be tempting those nice people to think there’s anything here that’s going to enhance their enjoying of said art form.

I can’t honestly say it’s done anything for me in that respect. To be blatantly honest, the only thing The Furry Community has enhanced for me is the prevalence of the Hentai aspect of anthropomorphics in my life, and involvement with Furry politics; neither of which is what I came in here for.

The plain sorry-ass truth is that, to get what I came in here for, you have to hide from the community in very small groups like The Furry Raiders, or isolated islands on Second Life, which might as well not be part of the community at all. To be a Furry fan is to be in opposition to the community, which as long as I’ve known it has been involved in selling something else.

Now I’m not going to deny that the something else being sold here tends to be something I enjoy the hell out of. It’s very adult in nature, it appeals to things a life long Furry fan finds aesthetically pleasing and erotically stimulating, and when you can find nice Furries to associate with the socialization aspect is great too.

So, yeah, what’s being sold is valid. It’s just being falsely marketed. If you just like Zootopia for it’s own sake this is not the place for you. The place for you is Disneyland. This is a place for people who want to get ridiculously adult about Zootopia. And I’m finally starting to see the point of view of people who’ve been telling me that for years.

This is not a community for people who create children’s books. A fur con is an adult space, and the people who keep screaming things need to be censored at cons for the sake of the children have got it all wrong. Fur cons are an adult thing that will never be safe for children. If you really care about the children, children should not be there. Especially now when you’ve got supposedly adult Furries talking about punching people at cons, bringing guns to defend themselves, or bringing a backpack full of matches and lighter fluid to burn someone alive in their fursuit.

This truth can no longer be denied; however nice some Furries may be, that doesn’t alter the fact that this fandom is loaded with lunatics. And it only takes one lunatic in a crowd, bolstered by shared contempt on the internet, to create a situation at a convention that could leave someone horribly dead, and any children witnessing it mentally ruined for life.

That is the trend of the future for Furry Fandom. By this time next year, threats of violence may have become so commonplace that huge security costs will have become standard, to the point where people won’t be able to put cons on anymore. And all that will be left are the totalitarian web sites that will only tolerate people who share the view of the site owners, who are the worst of the lot when it comes to supporting hate mongering and escalation of violent sentiment.

It has to be admitted at this point that things could not be deteriorating in this direction if there was not something inherently toxic about Furry Fandom; something fatally susceptible to mob rule and SJW’s, or even just whiny brats of adult age. The concept is flawed, it doesn’t work, it’s going to fail, and the train wreck is going to be heard around the world.

I feel it is time to admit that the belief I’ve held all my life that avoiding growing up was the solution to the toxic nature of humanity was all wrong. It’s based on the false premise that all children are innocent, good and nice. But that’s BS. Left to their own inclinations children will be bullies, selfish, cry babies, and all manner of other negatives that are twice as toxic when seen in adults, because adults have the power to act out on their childish mentalities. And this is especially horrible when I see these irrational adult aged children talking proudly about all the guns they own.

What I was really looking for when I came into The Furry Community was a place where Spectral Shadows would be appreciated. It seems rather obvious at this point why the community doesn’t support my work, or why my being in the community at all is some kind of LOL Furries joke. Just like everybody else, I’m trying to force something that doesn’t exist into being by the power of my will. Which would be fine if there could be shown to be a majority of Furries who want the same thing, but it can’t be shown, because it’s not true.

I think it’s time to own up to what The Furry Community is, and if I have some use for the porn and the fetishes, that’s a reason to at least hang around and consume the artistic output. But otherwise, I’m of no consequence to Fur Affinity. My audience there doesn’t amount to a drop in the bucket. My content doesn’t do a blessed thing to elevate that site beyond what it has always been, a porn site.

Heck, they don’t even offer tags for your work that aren’t fetish tags. They don’t offer tags like sci-fi, humor or mystery. They offer tags like inflation, bondage and vore. But this is the site you have to be on to have access to the main body of the fandom, and obviously the fandom is not demanding something better.

But hey, when I want inflation, bondage and vore, it’s the place to be. I’m not knocking it for what it is and what should be expected from it. I’m knocking myself for demanding that my stuff have a place there. Because, as hot as some of my characters may potentially be, I don’t make fap material. Artistically I answer to a higher authority. I’m a product of a different time when people looked to Furry for elevation. And it just seems stupid to be trying to sell that in the gutter that is FA.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, of course. I have a bit of an audience there that’s worth serving. But, I’m on the lookout for a safer place to put my work. Even Live Journal is not what I would consider a safe site, being as it’s now based in Russia where anything I write that might be construed as pro-gay could be considered illegal.

You know, people talk about how bad things will get without net neutrality. I’m thinking things are pretty bad already. I’m thinking the internet itself will go poof before too much longer if people can’t feel safe on it. And if the internet goes poof, anything that remains of Furry Fandom will go poof with it.

Any way you look at it, things are in a precarious situation. You’d think anyone who really cared would realize Furry Fandom is in serious danger of not surviving this current nonsense, and they’d be doing something to restore some kind of civility. But that’s not happening. Idiots rule this fandom, and idiots can’t rule their way out of a paper bag. They haven’t left anything worth preserving, the illusion is dead, and I don’t fancy playing in the dance band on the Titanic while the ship goes down.

Thus I’m considering retiring my essays, along with anything else I’ve ever written to promote the fandom. Whatever this new phase of the fandom will be, it will not have apologists like myself trying to hide its ugliness in favor of some dream of beauty that theoretically exists inside. And if a certain Furry I know is about to go on TV and spill everything he knows about what really goes on behind the scenes at Furry Fandom, I’m not encouraging him to hold back. As long as it’s true, I don’t see one good reason why I should urge him not to say what he knows from first hand experience, just because it will make long time fandom apologists like myself look like the fools we are.

Go on, blow the false image I’ve built up for the fandom out of the water. If I was that wrong, it’s only right that I should be proven so. After all, my cause has always been truth. And being a truth seeker means nothing if one does not acknowledge he can be wrong, and to freely own up when it’s shown he has been pursuing wishful thinking, rather than truth.